Dan Mountin lived to see his grandson overcome a rare cancer to run the Bolder Boulder and now he will be forever a part of the race that helped win that fight.

Three generations of Mountin men were on the Bolder Boulder course for the 35th running of the race Monday along with wives, sisters and daughters. One of them will never leave.

Together the family spread Dan's ashes around the fourth mile of the race. The middle of a Boulder Street might seem like an odd final resting place to you and me, but the Mountin family believes its patriarch would have liked nothing better.

"He would have gotten the biggest kick out of that," Dan's son, Eric Mountin said.

Dan Mountin died suddenly in his sleep in April. His family still isn't entirely sure what caused his death but they are soldiering on just as they believe Dan would have wanted them to. He was a Korean War veteran, an avid runner, a strong family man, a 10-time age-group medalist here and one of the Bolder Boulder's biggest fans.

But the death of Dan Mountin and his subsequent addition to the course was only part of a gut-wrenching, but inspiring Bolder Boulder story.

Before the 2011 race, Samuel Mountin, Dan's grandson and Eric's son, was diagnosed with a rare soft tissue cancer in his abdomen. It was a golf ball size tumor from a cancer called Rhabdomyosarcoma that only 250 children get each year.

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Samuel and his family live in Tallahassee, Fla., but they travel to Boulder each year to visit his aunt, who lives here. His father, Eric, and grandfather made a tradition of running the race every year. The 2011 race was supposed to be the first for Samuel who was 10 at the time.

His cancer diagnosis came shortly before the race and doctors advised against participating. The family sneaked him on to the race course near the very end of the race that year and allowed him to experience the feeling of entering Folsom Field and crossing the finish line.

Doing so probably played a part in saving his life.

From the moments after crossing the finish line with his family, Samuel began talking about returning in 2012 and running the entire race. Cancer be damned.

After his tumor was removed later that year, Samuel Mountin underwent six months of chemotherapy treatments that robbed him of his hair and strength but not his fighting spirit or his will and desire to complete his mission of running in the 2012 race.

"It sucked," Samuel says in his I Am Bolder video which received the most votes of all those submitted in the inaugural year of the race allowing participants to share their stories for a contest conducted on Facebook.

By receiving the most votes, Samuel won an expenses-paid trip to return to the race in 2014 along with a free entry.

There were moments of doubt and fear. Eric Mountin will never forget the day his son asked him if he was going to die.

"Having something to shoot for I think was really important," Eric Mountin says of the role the Bolder Boulder played in his son's fight. "...I mean you want to get better, but having something concrete like that, something tangible that you can really shoot for, I think really made a huge difference."

Samuel Mountin not only achieved his goal of overcoming the cancer he was diagnosed with and participating in the 2012 race. He returned this year and ran the entire course in 53 minutes with his father, including Slip n Slide stops. They finished in time to double back to meet the rest of the family at the point where they released Dan Mountin's ashes and then finished the race again.

"It means everything," Eric Mountin said of watching his son begin to thrive again. "The feeling of helplessness when your child goes through something like that is just tremendous. To see him be able to defeat it and succeed and really be in a position where he wants to do the things that he wants to do and to be able to run this race -- my whole family ran this race today -- you couldn't ask for anything more special.

"It's a gift."

Samuel wore a red-white-and-blue race bib with a simple tribute to his grandfather written in one corner. "We miss you," it read. Eric Mountin, a former Marine, also dedicated the race to his father all the while beaming with pride, amazed by the strength and courage he has seen from his son.

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